[Scholarly Communication] 

President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research.

Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine (NLM)'s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. The NIH must now decide how to implement the legislation. The Library will be monitoring the implementation planning process.

For more information, see the Library's web page, Public Access to NIH-Funded Research.

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